I hear that in the taboo play, women just get up on stage and walk around like they have a right! Scandalous.
A lot of us more sophisticated, citified feminist types act a little disdainful towards “The Vagina Monologues”. “That play is so last decade,” we say to each other. “Nothing against Eve Ensler, but the shine of novelty has faded. We get it already. If I loved my vagina any more, I’d have to buy her a Lexus.”
Well, while it’s great and all to reach the mastery level of feminism, it’s always good to remind yourself that the reason that conservatives fear and loathe this play so much is that it still has a lot of power as a feminist teaching tool for much younger women. It’s the Sassy magazine for the early 21st century. If nothing else, the reaction young women get lately when they try to embrace the play and its message that everything you’ve learned about what a terrible person you are because of your genitals is wrong, they are going to get the smackdown from people that just wish the vagina would disappear and take away all its power to soften our fascist phallic spirit.
Ensler’s stroke of genius in realizing that speaking the organ’s name out loud alone would scare people, as if you were saying “Bloody Mary” into a mirror (another invocation of demonic vaginal power?), continues to reveal itself today. First a theatre in Atlantic Beach, FL changed a billboard to read “The Hoohah Monologues” after some people complained about the scary word “vagina”. (Realizing how they were utterly defeating the point of even hosting the play, they changed it back.) And now some high school girls in Westchester County, NY are getting suspended over uttering the dread organ’s name aloud while performing “The Vagina Monologues” after they were told not to.
It seems that three female high school juniors received permission to read part of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” during a public open mic session. But they were told to avoid using the word “vagina,” which is mentioned in the excerpt, because young children would be in the audience and it would be taped for local cable TV. (The students have countered that the youngest audience member was in ninth grade.)
The girls decided, correctly in my opinion, that this was crap and read the piece as it was written. Then again, being a bit of a literature person, I tend to think that keeping the spirit of a piece you’re performing inviolable is more important than penetrating the resistance of those who fear the word “vagina”.
The principle is claiming that this is about insubordination, not censorship, which is cute in that way that authoritarians are when they’re trying to speak the democratic language of freedom and failing miserably because it’s simply not in their nature. What’s interesting is that the principle has created an excuse that technically makes the concept of “censorship” meaningless, because at any point in time, punishment being doled out for speaking forbidden ideas is technically doled out for insubordinating a rule not to speak those ideas. Other authorities should get on board with this. You weren’t given a ticket for speeding! No way. You were giving a ticket from breaking the law against speeding, an entirely different thing.
Seriously, this principal’s statements are just awesome.
At a press event held after the girls’, Principal Rich Leprine said the school “recognizes and respects student freedom of expression,” but that the freedom is not unfettered, especially when an activity or event is open to the general community.
You are free to say whatever you want with the door shut and your voice low, especially if you’re a young woman. And especially if you are expressing the concept that young women deserve genuine, not pretend, freedom. Unsurprisingly, the passage read by Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson that the principal found so offensive expresses just this concept of actual liberation for women, the freedom to walk about in public, secure in the knowledge that the streets belong just as much to women as to men.
My short skirt is a liberation
flag in the women’s army
I declare these streets, any streets
my vagina’s country.
There’s been a lot of talk in the blogs lately about naughty words, and the truth of the matter is that pearl-clutching over individual words that have certain letters pronounced in a specific order, like the taboo against “faggot” or “vagina”, is not the issue and has never been the issue. Dust-ups occur over meaning, which is what the wingnuts are trying desperately to make you forget as they say the issue with what Ann Coulter said was the vulgarity of the term “faggot”, not her attempts to drum up hatred against gay people in order to score cheap political points. Of course, by pretending it’s certain sounds uttered or certain letters typed, regardless of the context, wingnuts have sort of backed themselves into a corner on this. For instance, to argue that discrete words are the issue, not the concepts behind them, you have to conclude my Plan B and Virgin Mary joke had nothing whatsoever offensive about it, since no officially naughty word was used, just implied.
But as you can see from the dust-up over the word “vagina”, it’s not about the words themselves, but about the concepts. The fury over “The Vagina Monologues” has never been about some mysterious substance inside the letter V-A-G-I-N-A that causes people to lose their minds. The fury is over the themes of the play and Ensler’s attempt to get to fight back against misogyny. Add this little dust-up to the evidence bin—it’s hardly a happy coincidence for the principle that the theme of female freedom would have be excised alongside the forbidden word. When he says that young people were exposed to this passage, is he mad that 14-year-olds learned that women have vaginas? Or is he mad that teenage girls are exposed to the idea that there’s something wrong with a world where women don’t feel free to walk down the street without getting randomly punished for having vaginas? I have my suspicions.
87 Responses to “But if you speak the vile name out loud, it will summon the beast who will come and bite off the firm resolve of all our young men”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Vulva Monologues.
I’m an awful person, but that’s my first thought every time this sort of thing comes up.
Also, how late do you stay up blogging, Amanda?
I think you’re exactly right, Amanda, that this censorship sort of response is in many cases motivated less by the word itself and more by what it represents. But I also think it then trickles down to being the word itself (as was evident in the whole “hoohah monologues” kerfuffle). And I think the result is both community-wide and atomistic. On a broader level, if these words and ideas are suppressed, it makes it harder to change the status quo view on women’s autonomy, equality and bodies. And on an individual level, calling the word “vagina” — or even scrotum — a “dirty” word makes young women and men feel that their bodies are dirty. It encourages them not to ask questions of their parents or teachers about their bodies, the changes their bodies undergo throughout those (sometimes terrifying) teenage years. It also makes it harder to have a real conversations about sex education; how the hell is a teacher supposed to teach kids to roll on a condom if she can’t say penis or to tell them about the symptoms of HPV if she can’t say vagina? Which, of course, ties together my point about individualism and your point about the broader results and motivations behind the ridiculousness exemplified by the principal here.
N, the more I think about it, the more I think “vagina” is what makes this shocking, since that’s the biting mechanism that ruins the phallic resolve of young men more than the vulva, as much as the latter might be preferred by women actually trying to get off.
Not late at all. The post took about 30 minutes to write this morning.
I’d add that in the passage quoted, the vagina again is the organ that’s more in dispute, not the surrounding vulva. It’s what the implied rapists who have taken on the job of scaring women off the streets and into our homes are seeking.
Are you allowed to say “kidney” in school? What about “tibia?” Oooh, let’s not talk about any anatomy at all, thus getting around the fact that when given an anatomy text, most teenagers will turn to the reproductive section first.
And “My Short Skirt” is my absolute favorite piece from The Vagina Monologues.
Technocracygirl — Exactly (on both counts)!
There you go spoiling the pristine, virginal nature fo the intertubes with disgusting, unspeakable words like ‘tibia’.
It’s hilarious the problems our society has with referring to our genitals, by any name at all. Yes, there are terms for all body parts that may be involved in sex that are generally accepted as vulgar (pussy, dick, ass, etc.), and ridiculously infantile terms that are considered not vulgar (hooha?). But I always thought that the correct anatomical terms were the “accepted” way of referring to them in “serious” conversation… I guess not any more.
There was a very funny episode of “King of the Hill” some years ago in which Peggy Hill was tasked with teaching the (very controversial) sex education class at the middle school. In one scene, Peggy was staring at herself in the mirror, trying to force herself (even in the privacy of her own bathroom) to utter the word “penis”. The method she used to get past her mental block was to say the word “happiness” over and over, syllable by syllable, and then drop the first syllable (”hap”). The unabashed ridiculousness of this scene is just a wonder to behold.
I had a friend whose toddler got in trouble at her preschool for saying that she hurt her “butt”. Apparently, “butt” was considered vulgar by the teacher. I asked what in the world little kids are allowed to say if not “butt”… it turned out the only acceptable answer was “bottom”. I’m sure that will be ruled out shortly, too.
It’s hard to keep up.
When I was in the monologues in college, the woman who did “My Short Skirt” did a fun thing with that line:
“I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s CUNT-ry.”
(accomplished with just enough lingering on that syllable to create the impression)
I wonder what would be the reaction if these young women did that?
What I find obscene is that all the tidbits of procreation are obscene. You see it on tv when a woman has her nipples removed due to breast cancer. Then they can show the entire breast and when they do, pearl clutchers don’t barrage the Discovery Channel. Plus, the nippleless breast isn’t fuzzed, which tells me that it’s the female nipple that’s obscene and since male nipples aren’t obscene, the female nipple must be obscene because it plays a part in procreation, like the penis, scrotum, vulva, and vagina. However, on Discovery, they can show the ovaries and plumb the interior of a penis, so what’s obscene is anything that plays a part in procreation that can be easily seen.
Man, if I tried to explain our culture to an alien, I’d be embarrassed.
I think the reason that Americans are wound 10 turns too many with regards to sex is that it makes us that much more susceptible to Madison Avenue using sex to sell us more shit we don’t want and don’t need. Sex sells because sex is perpetual, immortal burlesque. If, as a culture, we’d drop the damn boas and let ourselves see female nipples without pearl clutching and protesting, Madison Avenue would lose their most powerful tool: our anxiety.
Wow- that’s so cool. As if to ironically prove the point of the Amanda’s entire post, the comment moderation robot flagged my comment as suspect, probably because I used a word like “hooha” (or something
.
Irony is especially cool when it’s not even intended
“my vagina’s CUNT-ry”
Ooh, very Shakespearian- doesn’t Hamlet have a line when talking to Ophelia that goes something like “Do you think I speak of country matters?” (pun definitely intended)…
“this censorship sort of response is in many cases motivated less by the word itself and more by what it represents”
Censorship is always directed at ideas. We may at times think in images but we communicate with words.
If you want to limit the range of a particular dialogue or suppress a pattern of thought, then remove the applicable words/phrases from the lexicon of “appropriate” language.
Reminds me of my favorite school banning story. The exact details are somewhat murky because its been a while since I’ve read the story (as in years). Some school decided that Hooters T-Shirts were fine for school wear and were not at all offensive. Now some middle school girls thought this was demanding and in protest had their own shirts made. Instead of an owl these shirts featured a rooster and the name “Cocks” with the “O” the rooster’s eye looking like (|). And the nice caption “Nothing to crow about!” This of course lead to bannings and suspensions.
I have a comment being moderated too. Good point about the moderation robot. It’s as prissy as the principal.
Oh that dirty, dirty Shakespeare…he should be suspended from school too!
Rob, that’s a great story. Oppression is hell for a person, but heaven for creativity.
The Dentata Monologues. O noes! The thing around the nice warm hole for wee-wees to go into to make with the babies (or just the pleasure of the owners of said wee-wees) is claiming that it’s an actual person. With rights and shit. The next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to vote and own property (like themselves!), and from there it’s a short short hop to mass castrations! Men will have to wear protective steel codpieces just to go out in public!
Slightly different with the moderation queue. It’s not trying to supress women’s pride in their bodies so much as supress thousands of spam messages about how women should be fucked on camera for money. And even then, it’s not the concept that’s really offensive so much as the server overload. It’s sort of like saying that taking a crap is natural, but i don’t want someone to dump a truckload of manure into my house.
Micheyd, when I read Romeo and Juliet in a high school textbook for 9th grade English class, it had the Nurse’s (dirty-ish) monologue removed. Seriously.
I think he’s too dumb to understand that not all references to sex organs or sex acts are pornographic. I think adminstrators are totally freaked out by their students, at school-sponsored functions, discussing sexuality. It’s like the whole dog scrotum dust-up with that children’s book. I don’t think misogyny is directly implicated, except insofar as patriarchy is what gives rise to the notion that sex is a dirty dirty scary sickening thing.
Ah, northern Westchester County. This isn’t at all surprising if you know the area. Katonah is an extremely wealthy town. Mostly new money, Dem leaning voters. Conformity is pretty much demanded. But you also have a number of truly liberal families who don’t put up with ridiculous authoritarianism. Although the majority are conformists with all the obvious taboos, the anti-authoritarians make up a significant minority. Given all that, public (and often clever) rebellion by teens is par for the course. Wow, this brings back some memories and emotions.
If you want to see the sort of tension between the two factions, read the comments at http://www.nyjournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070306/UPDATE/703060453
I think it is retarded that these girls are in trouble for “insubordination.” I know exactly how this story went.
They had to submit their “open” mic piece for approval. They had to agree not to say the word “vagina” (Am I going to Hell now?). If they had not agreed to this and said “Hey, we think this damages the integrity of the work and it is important that it be left in.” Then the priciple would have said “You cannot preform this because it is offensive and inappropriate.” So then the censorship of this work would have been its complete elimination.
Basically the priciple is mad because they tricked him into allowing them to perform something he wouldn’t have allowed. Because we CERTAINLY can’t have young girls talking about their bodies as if they have a right to! Or Using biological terms that are taught in health class! The horror! We must shelter the Children lest they begin to understand the world and think for themselves.
Yeah, but that’s the thing. The female nipple douesn’t take part in procreation as such. Although honestly I don’t know why this even makes a difference since personally I don’t think procreation is obscene *eye roll* but if you go by fundie logic (i.e. sex is obscene) then why is the female nipple involved in this censorship?
*doesn’t
Zach’s comment about controlling language for the purpose of censoring ideas and Capote’s comment about oppression being heaven for creativity makes me think about the show “Family Guy”.
Really, much of that show’s entire schtick is to be as “vulgar” as possible without ever actually saying any overtly vulgar words. In order to accomplish this, they often stumble into some inspired creativity.
There was an episode where Lois and Peter got divorced, and Brian (the family dog) had to step in and marry Lois (for some reason or other). In the bedroom, Lois insisted that they sleep in separate beds, much to Brian’s consternation. The dialog went something like this:
Brian: Seriously Lois, we’ve waited a while- how about we push the beds together tonight?
Lois: My goodness, Brian, you’re like a dog with a bone…
Brian: Yeah, tell me about it! (Brian storms out in an angry huff)
Lois: What are you going to do?
Brian: (from down the hall) What do you think?!
No dirty words, but obvious references to bestiality and masturbation. Very impressive, really.
On a side note, I clearly watch too many cartoons.
Regarding Holly’s 9:54 comment, my wife and I often discus why English speakers, particularly North American English speakers, are so screwed up about sex. We speculate it’s lingering influence of the Puritans.
And that nipple thing confuses the hell out of me. The entire breast except for the nipple is all right to show on TV, but the moment the nipple pokes out it’s obscene (unless it’s a man’s)? Crazy.
Not really. An erect nipple shows female arousal, which can of course only be done to entice a man. As such its meant for sex. Which is why you get all those people freaking out when they see breastfeeding because here we see a non-sexual breast and everyone knows that breasts are only sexual!
[…] Amanda and Samhita have more. […]
Oh dear, so now even the proper official term for naughty bits is a bad word! You’d think that it was the naughty bits themselves that were bad!
Concerned Parent, the puritans get a bad rap. They weren’t party animals, but they also weren’t perpetual prudes. I believe that cultures develop much as species develop. The evolution of culture is susceptible to chance, but only those chance happenings that enable perpetuation are kept. So, I think that by chance, the weird dichotomy of ‘Sex is naughty/Hey, sex sells EVERYTHING!’ came to pass and it was kept because it kept the filling the cash registers. So, we’re kept forever-infantile for the sake of profit. Thus, we must endure swooning, shrieking, and pearl clutching if someone sees a female nipple while we’re being forever teased with “Hey, the turkey’s ready!” t-shirts and breasts boosted with Wonderbras.
The opening of the post reminded me of the modern day art world’s been-there-done-that attitude toward Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party.”
I’ve always been puzzled by the conservative reaction to the play (which, I confess, I’ve never seen). There’s a ready-made Lads’ rejoinder to the title:
“Of course they’re monologues. Nothing with a vagina lets a man get a word in edgeways”.
And, if we are going to talk Family Guy, and “country”, how about “Quagmire’s Cross-Country Tour” (a banner read by a character but not seen by the audience)? Brian: “Doesn’t `country’ have an `o’?” Quagmire: “Nope!”
So what would have happened to the students if they’d replaced vagina with pussy? I swear, Maud Lebowski was right when she said some men are even uncomfortable with the word. Vagina.
Holly:
“Man, if I tried to explain our culture to an alien, I’d be embarrassed.”
May be the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks.
“Whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his “dick,” his “rod,” his…”johnson.”"
Oh, Maude. I will never be able to match such utter disdain! It is to weep.
OT but is there a male equivalent of pearl clutching? Bible clutching? (since good xtian men do seem to be the most easily offended).
What cracks me up about the Puritans, is that when they came to Provincetown and later Plymouth, MA, upon encountering the savages it wasn’t the nudity of the scantily clothed natives that offended the Puritans - it was the jewelry. Nudity was natural and plain. They thought adornment was idolatry and led to devil worship. With all those big tooth and feather necklaces and head pieces… you can imagine the response from the Puritans.
So to them, jewelry = bad, nudity = totally fine.
At least for the non-Puritans. I don’t believe they applied the same standards to their own dress though.
Regarding Holly’s 9:54 comment, my wife and I often discus why English speakers, particularly North American English speakers, are so screwed up about sex. We speculate it’s lingering influence of the Puritans.
Nah — it’s the lingering influence of the Victorians. Despite their restrictions on naughty behavior, the Puritans weren’t all that, well, Puritanical. They lived on farms. They knew all about reproduction.
Our problem is the Victorians, who offered the world a deadly combination of hypocrisy and ignorance. If you pretend that the young man doesn’t have syphilis and don’t tell his new bride what it is or how she can avoid catching it from him, that’s the Victorian ideal. See also Ibsen’s play Ghosts, which was the Vagina Monologues of its day.
But an erect nipple can also simply mean, “It’s too damn cold.”
I want to know what word they were supposed to have used instead of “vagina.” And I would love it if someone quoted that terrible sequence from the Bloodhound Gang at the principal:
Jim’s Mother: What if you change the word vagina to something else?
Jim: Like box or pussy or cunt?
Jim’s Mother: No, Jim.
As terrible as the Bloodhound Gang is, that bit always just totally cracks me up.
I think it would have been quite funny if the girls promised to not use “that word” in their piece and instead replaced it with “cunt”. If you’re going to make a point, you might as well go all out.
This kind of crap helps perpetuate child molestation.
No, hear me out!
We tell people that we can’t use the correct names of body parts because a young girl (in this case, 14 years of age) might hear it! And then when 3-4 year old Susie tells her pre-school teacher that “Uncle George touched my little flower”, the poor teacher has no idea that “little flower” is a codeword for “vagina” and that little Susie has been raped.
How the flying hell does this school teach sex-ed without using the word vagina????
Witless Chum, imagine trying to explain our culture to someone from 100 or even 50 years ago.
Me: “Now, you might see thin, thin women, but don’t try to feed them.”
Old Tyme Guy: “Oh, but we must. We can’t let the poor starve.”
Me: “No, no, no. Many of them are quite wealthy. And if you fed them, they might swallow, but then they’d excuse themselves to use the powder room and force themselves to vomit.”
Old Tyme Guy: “Okay. I’ve heard enough. I want to go home.”
“Whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his “dick,â€? his “rod,â€? his…â€?johnson.â€?”
I call mine The Disappointer™
Yep, the victorians were the ones who covered the limbs of their tables with floor-length cloth lest anyone become aroused by curvy woodwork. And had the most prolific porn and prostituion industries until very recent times (which probably says a it about the current state of the world).
The principal is between a rock and, er, a hard place. Because The Vagina Monologues (like Old Bill with all his whoresons and Caesar plowing Cleopatra) are recognized “literature”, but they also exactly about the kind of license-to-shame that gives principals and other patriarchs so much power. So even as I condemn his actions I pity the poor guy.
To deviate slightly from what ShortWoman says, if we don’t teach our children the proper terms for their parts, then they don’t have the vocabulary to describe what happens to them, if something should go wrong. And, in avoiding the subjects of their bodies altogether, we teach them that their bodies are shameful, and to not report shameful things that happen to them - they don’t want their parents to know that they’re “dirty.”
As a mother of a three-year old who asked me last month why I don’t have a penis, I’ve been reading [The New] Speaking of Sex - What your children need to know and when they need to know it by Meg Hickling RN (ISBN 1-896863-70-4). Meg is a (Canadian) sex educator who delivers frank, scientifically-accurate seminars and workshops for children and their parents, doctors and nurses, and educators. (Note to Concerned Parent: I know your baby’s just wee, but this is actually a good book to read now. You can get it at the library or Kidsbooks.)
Meg has spent time interviewing incarcerated sex offenders, who have told her that they always target the children who don’t know about their bodies. They know that children who know the proper names for their parts are more likely to have an open dialogue with their parents. Children who don’t know the proper names, and who haven’t been told the mechanics of sex, are unable to say, “Mom, a guy put his penis in my vagina/anus.”
Or if their parents don’t talk about anything below the waist except “Don’t touch it!”, their children aren’t going to talk about it either.
Makes me fucking cry, it does.
“This kind of crap helps perpetuate child molestation.”
Keeping people ignorant on pretty much any subject only helps those who want to take advantage of them. This really isn’t any different.
Oh man, I love me some Bloodhound Gang. That is a perfect quote, too. Pretty much the grand sum total of the track, too. They remind me a lot of the Dead Kennedys, in that there’s been a few hundred times when a line or two (or the whole thing, like in this case) from a song fits to illustrate a point absolutely perfectly, but I have to bite my tongue, as the context is too out there for “polite” company. (”Mixed company” actually is more appropriate, but the mix being more of age than gender. Which is of course why that particular track is so funny, not the looking to a female for synonyms, but to someone of a different generation.) /musical tangent
I kinda feel sorry for the principal, a LITTLE bit. The way our culture is nowadays, the outrage from the right over “letting” students use such a dirty word is pretty much guaranteed. If he hadn’t tried to stop them from saying such incredibly objectionable things, the school would’ve been sued to hell and back. Try to prevent this, and punish the offenders, and he just looks like a prudish moron who couldn’t find the point if his students had put it on his chair before he sat down. And, based on what actually shook out from this mess, there’s probably been some really great conversations going on amongst the students in the area. The controversy probably generated much more introspective thought (in a MUCH larger group of people) about why the proper, medical term for something is seen as vulgar than would have been generated if they’d just presented that one passage w/o comment or complaint from the Powers That Be.
I can’t find much more about the open (Professor Doctor) mike night – why were they having it in the first place? Is it an ongoing thing? How closely was it associated with the school? Even the local news articles are more along the lines of “vagina is not a dirty word.â€? Sigh, trying to get a bit of context, it’s not happening.
Oh well, just glad to know that the girls in question are so damn smart about the whole thing. They get the point. If they’re this comfortable with the idea that they’re fully human (and that others don’t see them as such, but it’s the others’ problem, definitely not theirs) as 11th graders, they’re going to be an incredible force for good as they take these lessons learned forward with them.
For what it’s worth, I believe the theatre that changed the play’s name to “Hoohah Monologues” had to change it back due to their contract which requires the appropriate name to be used. I also believe a theatre in Elizabethtown, KY was blasted by some of the local prudes when they posted the play as being on the bill. One of the (of course) male protestors I believe was quoted as not wanting to have to explain to his 8 or 9 year old daughter or niece what the word meant…
“That play is so last decade,� we say to each other. “Nothing against Eve Ensler, but the shine of novelty has faded. We get it already. If I loved my vagina any more, I’d have to buy her a Lexus.�
But… driving? Oh, God, that’s an image I need to scrub out of my head.
I’d add that in the passage quoted, the vagina again is the organ that’s more in dispute, not the surrounding vulva. It’s what the implied rapists who have taken on the job of scaring women off the streets and into our homes are seeking.
No, what they seek is power. It’s not the organ they stick it in, it’s the act of sticking it when and as they want without the woman being able to reject - that’s what gets them off.
What I find obscene is that all the tidbits of procreation are obscene. You see it on tv when a woman has her nipples removed due to breast cancer. Then they can show the entire breast and when they do, pearl clutchers don’t barrage the Discovery Channel. […] Man, if I tried to explain our culture to an alien, I’d be embarrassed.
I recently dealt with a series of books for 6-12 year olds published here in NZ, explaining to children what various animals were - what was a fish, a bird, a mammal. The definitive test for mammals was, of course, suckling offspring. They were careful to include examples of people throughout the discussion in that book, including a picture of a baby breastfeeding. These things will be distributed throughout school libraries countrywide.
I don’t understand the US official culture’s hysteria on these things.
So, I think that by chance, the weird dichotomy of ‘Sex is naughty/Hey, sex sells EVERYTHING!’ came to pass and it was kept because it kept the filling the cash registers.
Problem with this thesis - the people doing the shrieking aren’t the ones selling the innuendo for profit.
Well, glad to know that there will never be a stage version of Kindergarten Cop. Seriously, how do these people explain the difference between girls and boys to their own children? Girls have an innie, boys have an outie? And then they’d get mad at little Chastity for thinking that she’s a boy because her belly button is an outie?
“If he hadn’t tried to stop them from saying such incredibly objectionable things, the school would’ve been sued to hell and back.”
Could you explain how a reasonable person would even begin to think that a high school student hearing the word “vagina” uttered in public, in an educational environment, in a non-vulgar way, would have grounds for a lawsuit? I mean, really. What the hell would the grounds be? How are they going to demonstrate harm–claim the parents were running a long-term experiment concerning the effects of an absence of vagina-related knowledge?
The Penis Monologues Are Coming!
The vibrant phenomenon that redefined the male body will soon be here. Until then, please read these wonderful excerpts. Come, and you will never be the same again.
For years I have asked men of all classes and races the most personal questions and recorded their answers. At first, there is always a pause, a recognition of moving into a different world. The taboo, the forbidden. But once the men I asked overcame their inhibitions, their experiences came freely from them, adding and layering until their many voices began to come together into a single warm stream. I asked them about their penis, how they thought of it, what they did with it. It took only a short time to realize that every man had his own special, unique penile identity. Here is related an untold story that has for too long been suppressed. It is a story of vitality and virility, of beauty and sadness. It is the sum part of my interviews, the Penis Monologues…
I had thought it was all my fault when it happened, but with time and greater knowledge I realized that my wife had no appreciation for the true beauty of penises. She would hardly even look, it was a region that I now realize she avoided; she would always avert her eyes from my cock. She was heartless and had no consideration for my needs day after day until she finally left me and took the kids. I’ve hardly been able to see them ever since. She’s always trying to keep me away from them and the courts invariably back her…
If you could dress your penis what would you do?
-A tuxedo, my penis is a gentleman.
-I’d give it a Roman legionnaire’s helmet.
-Definitely a disco suit.
-An astronaut suit, nice and tight.
-A bathrobe, mine is the casual type.
-It’s naked, at one with the natural order…
What would your penis say?
-“Ramming speed!�
-“Please, please, oh please!�
-“Just hanging out.�
-“Almost there, almost there!�…
Hilda was a perfectly boring woman. Not a single trait distinguished her, but she loved penises. She would stare at them all for hours and hours, fascinated with every shape and size. She loved them when they lay in limp repose amongst a lush foliage of pubic hairs, she loved them when they stood to the height of their nobility, towering above the leafy canopy below…
Cock. Cock. Cock. There, I’ve said it. That forbidden word of penile identity. A word that hails far back in time to the ancient religion of the Celts. It is a strong word, a sacred word that referred to the potent part of a man, a word that has been suppressed by society. With its every utterance we become free of the forces that hold back our penile identity. Let us all say it and throw back the powers that be. Cock! Cock! Cock!…
My penis. My penis. The flaming spear of Ares, the passionate arrow, the pillar of creation, a great mountain of fire seeping white hot lava! My penis, my penis, me…
RE: Nipples
my favorite nipple cover up on Discovery Health Channel was in a male to female sex change operation. Chest of man: nipples visible. Then they put breast implants in that man’s chest. Instantly, nipples were blurred. I’m like omg it’s the SAME set of nipples!!! I just saw them 2 seconds ago!
Hey Magickitty: interesting, depressing, and not that surprising. :/
magickitty:
Thank you for making my point a bit more eloquently than I was able to in my pre-coffee indignant rage. The very idea that there are “bad” body parts we cant talk about makes me see red.
[…] I am deeply concerned when on the same day, I read about high school girls being suspended for saying VAGINA, and a cosmetic company rep says “For a long time, the idea of a ripe, rosy nipple has been considered appealing and alluring’’. […]
err maybe I should have used ‘male’ instead of ‘man’ since the person identified as a woman but had a male outside. Sorry if I offended anyone with that word usage. But that’s the way Discovery Channel represented it. This is a “man” so it’s okay. Uh oh she’s a dirty woman, better cover up those nipples! When it was the same exact body.
No, can’t explain how a reasonable person would think that. Also can’t explain how a reasonable person would think that if the definition of science doesn’t allow ID to be called science means that it’s the definition that has something wrong with it. But, you’ve got places like Liberty Law School pumping out lawyers, and more than a few places willing to pay the legal fees, for the specific purpose of suing everything they don’t like until the country is in their own image. It almost looks like they took a page from the Scientologists, who really showed what could be done if one didn’t care so much about the possibility of wasting money on a case they might lose, or make them look silly, as with the intimidation.
My guess for how they might “justify” such a potential suit would be that is was a violation of the opt-out requirements for sex-ed that all school systems seem to require. Schools are allowed to forbid “lewd” speech, and it’s pretty apparent that the word vagina is considered lewd by a significant part of the populace. And really, if they can file class action suits on behalf of all of us who were forcibly exposed to Janet Jackson’s boobie, something where Teh Childrenz are exposed to a naught thought in a semi-school environment isn’t much of a stretch.
On the thought of nipples, and how dangerous they are to western society - I see erect nipples way more often on prime-time tv than I do on my own chest. Granted, they’re always covered, but women on tv seem to have their headlights on a strangely high percentage of the time. No way that’s just happenstance, unless every tv set is as cold as the Ed Sullivan Theater is joked to be. I think it’s more a matter of we’re allowed to focus on breasts but only as a matter of how dangerous they are, and how having them will kill you. Seriously, I feel sometimes that the Powers That Be want us to be unable to think the word “breast” without mentally following it with the word “cancer”.
“my favorite nipple cover up on Discovery Health Channel was in a male to female sex change operation. Chest of man: nipples visible. Then they put breast implants in that man’s chest. Instantly, nipples were blurred. I’m like omg it’s the SAME set of nipples!!! I just saw them 2 seconds ago!”
that is freakin hilarious.
Has it been thirty years since Jane Curtin (with a sly wink) reminded us to “Take care of your uvula”?
Have we advanced so little?
That Discovery Channel program must’ve been a weird mind-trip. It’s not that nipples of a male who had breast implants are forbidden, and of course, the slightest-of-chest (or pre-pubescent) female’s nipples are. Though, now that I think about it, the instance of a male with breast implants but not part of a sex-change that I’m thinking about is from The Man Show, which was pre-Janet. Had the under-the-belt part of the operation already been completed? Or is it just having implants in a non-swaggering male? I have to wonder where they’d draw the line with a pre-op undergoing hormone therapy.
And, of course, the idea that anyone watching ANY of the surgery shows would be squicked out by the external appearance of NORMAL body parts just blows my mind. The only thing I can think of is that someone thought they were protecting the privacy of the newly-legal woman. Which has its own host of logic problems. Really, it sounds like a whole book/documentary/college course/whatever could be dedicated to trying too understand everything that’s going on in the treatment of nipples in just that context.
I only clued in a couple months ago that the origin of the word for our whole biological class is the breast. Mammals have mammories - yes, I can be slow. So, really, the implication can almost be taken to be that the blurring of the female breast isn’t just denying that we’re human, but hiding that we’re even mammals. Too bad women are also seen as metaphorically spineless, we might be completely out of the animal kingdom if I can’t get myself off this mental tangent.
Jane…my father and I were watching that same Discovery Channel episode and could not believe when they started blurring out the nipples after the operation had been completed. It just proved right there how men’s and women’s bodies are viewed and treated differently.
suddenly I’m thinking of the “proper words song” in that video at Shakes. ^^;
What? A school administrator did something stupidly reactionary?
Why, that NEVER happens.
OT but is there a male equivalent of pearl clutching?
Crotch-grabbing.
Regarding other body parts being just as offensive as “vagina” … an anecdote:
I’ve been called a “vagina” several times by guys for whom English is not their first language. Of course, it’s meant to be an insult. (Sometimes it’s “vegina” or “verginia” … and I shouldn’t laugh, but I do. “I want to now ur verginia size” … *lul*)
Well, one day a guy online decided I was being too uppity for him, so he wrote to me, “bye vegina”
I responded with, “Bye, xiphoid process.” And then I continued calling him the names of random various body parts–nothing sexual. Just stuff like “ulna.”
He got SO OFFENDED. It was hilarious. He thought I was calling him all these horrible, dirty names … and it served him damn right for trying to use “vegina” as an insult. Somehow, though, I don’t think it made an impression on him, even when I explained exactly what I was doin.
You’re expecting rationality out of these people?
These are the same kinds of people that squeal and throw tantrums about anti-bullying campaigns in schools that include preventing anti-gay slurs being used (gives a new impression on Coulter’s “school-yard taunt, eh?), or when same-sex parents/families are mentioned in school classes on diversity and/or families.
They seriously argue that just merely acknowledging that gays and lesbians simply exist and just might, you know, be worthy of the same respect as, perhaps, everybody else, is EXACTLY the same as teaching their oh-so young, innocent, pure, angelic, special and unique child how to perform “TEH ANAL SEX!”.
They say “we want to be the ones to tell our child about this when they are ready” which is of course code-speak for “need to make them bigots”. It’s amazing how merely acknowledging that reality that doesn’t precisely match their perfect white cooke-cut mcmansion suburbia is evil and perverted, and we shouldn’t expose children to that!
Leaving out of course that there might ALREADY be a child, Jenny, who is just figuring out that the way she likes her friend best Heather, isn’t quite the same way the other girls like their best friends …. in much the same way that there already ARE vaginas in class, and trying to pretend otherwise does not only not make them go away, it makes everything FAR more dangerous.
But then, reality has got a well known liberal bias.
Bonjourno:
That’s awesome.
I now feel i must call the next person who is insulting to me “A plebian ulna. A uvulous xiphoid process on the collective metatarsals of humanity.”
^.^
- The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, by Michael Swanwick - about to be reprinted, too …Whenever I see one of these stories, I have a proto-old-person sitcom flashback. I served as an “organizer assistant,” whatever the hell that is, for two productions back in undergrad. On the second, the students inserted a small flyer into the program taking issue with the play’s treatment of female circumcision/genital mutilation, presumably inspired by class conversations with our women’s studies professor, a Kenyan woman who was herself circumcized/mutilated and feels that the Western media and many feminist theorists have done a piss-poor job of explaining a rather varied phenomenon.
The organizers (not the students, the ones who gave us permission to perform it) were rather furious, and there was talk that the campus would not be allowed to perform it again.
So now, I see the posters go up every February, and I think, you know, I bought the book, handed out flyers, helped set up lighting, and sold tickets for two performances…I gave at the office. Nice to know it’s still a starting point for the kids, though, as long as I’m feeling old.
Though I don’t recall ever being granted access to the mastery level of feminism. When I do, does it mean professors will stop giving me shit for using “they” as a singular unisex pronoun?
Problem with this thesis - the people doing the shrieking aren’t the ones selling the innuendo for profit.
You think the innuendo doesn’t fill the collection plates?
Seems like a perfect symbiosis to me. If the shriekers ever got their way and got sexy stuff banned from the airwaves, they’d have to find something else to shriek about to get people to donate to their decency crusades.
Dan S. -
Dude, the school’s logic doesn’t even make internal sense. If girls have more wisdom but less action, shouldn’t they be rackin’-frackin’ ENCOURAGED to take up politics?!?! Seriously, that’s some fucked-up reasoning there, and that’s assuming I agreed with their premise…
Oh Chet… TOO funny.
Maybe y’all have read way too much into this. It seems to me that the most probable reason was that the principal didn’t want to be disciplined by the superintendant or schol board, and didn’t want someone to sue the school.
In this legitgious society, it’s always safer to say “no” than “yes.”
[…] March 7th, 2007 Amanda at Pandagon writes a masterful piece about the latest attempt to censor the Vagina Monologues. […]
Wouldn’t biology or health class contain the word “vagina” in it?
If these were all high school students, everyone would be exposed to the word.
I wonder if anyone has written a meta-play, where censorship is worked into the attempted recitation of the vagina monologues? One could avoid using the word vagina entirely, but be especially caustic by delving into the motivations for suppressing the speech of the students.
I’d love to see someone try to ban that.
You think the innuendo doesn’t fill the collection plates?
In this particular case, Mrs grundy was the school principal. And while the shrieking and moral panic over sex may fill the collection plates, the hypothesis was linking said moral panic to the over-use of Teh Tits&Ass to sell actual stuff in the market. Still unproven, IMHO.
[…] March 7, 2007 Posted by demolition65 in Pandamansanity, Idiots, Humor, Science, Blogging. trackback One the one hand, this pathologically hysterical (that word was chosen carefully) screed by Amandadefending the tiresome play The Vagina Monologues. […]
I just get so tired of other people who are so afraid of sex and anything to do with it they cannot utter the word….’VAGINA’. Think of what would happen to their precious little children if they heard the word. Why…they might have to TALK about sex with their kids. And we dont want that because then they would just breed more.
“Why…they might have to TALK about sex with their kids. And we dont want that because then they would just breed more.”
Ironically, they don’t mind the breeding as long as it’s WASPs doing the breeding. Oh, and as long as no one involved in the process enjoyed any of it…
That’s almost like trying to ban Fahrenheit 451 from schools! Quite ironic.
Ironically, they don’t mind the breeding as long as it’s WASPs doing the breeding. Oh, and as long as no one involved in the process enjoyed any of it…
It’s fine if the man enjoys it, just not if the woman does.
The obsessiveness of prudery is funny indeed. ON the discovery channel there was a show on how posable manequins are manufactured. they actually blurred the stupid foam rubber “breasts” as the torso was pulled from the mold. I mean the damn things dont even jiggle properly and are about as suggestive as the head restraint on your car seat.
The obsession however must have some link to making porn a viable business. Its the same obsession just played backwards or something
greensmile:
I saw that. How It’s Made is a cool show, but I was absolutely dumbstruck when I saw those blurs.
They didn’t even have nipples! They were just two mostly-amorphous foam lumps sticking out of a larger, slightly-less-amorphous foam lump.
[…] Amanda over at Pandagon took apart the Principal’s rationale (and those of the others who have a problem with words like vagina or scrotum): But as you can see from the dust-up over the word “vaginaâ€?, it’s not about the words themselves, but about the concepts. The fury over “The Vagina Monologuesâ€? has never been about some mysterious substance inside the letter V-A-G-I-N-A that causes people to lose their minds. The fury is over the themes of the play and Ensler’s attempt to get to fight back against misogyny. Add this little dust-up to the evidence bin—it’s hardly a happy coincidence for the principle that the theme of female freedom would have be excised alongside the forbidden word. When he says that young people were exposed to this passage, is he mad that 14-year-olds learned that women have vaginas? Or is he mad that teenage girls are exposed to the idea that there’s something wrong with a world where women don’t feel free to walk down the street without getting randomly punished for having vaginas? I have my suspicions. […]
An update: The (in-school) suspensions have been deferred while the school board decides on an appropriate response (how to save face). One of the students was interviewed on the CBC (Canada’s national state-owned radio) last night. And yes, the word “vagina” was used. (Many, many times. Mocking our southern neighbours is a bit of a pasttime up here.)
Andrew was that on “As it Happens?” I missed it last night.
magickitty, yup. Unfortunately, I don’t recall which student was interviewed, or indeed who the host was. But the student was well spoken. And unlike Maude Lebowski, the word “penis” also made an entrance, or rather an exit: the host wrapped up the piece by wondering if the school had a penis allergy too.